Under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe, the Japanese government is proactively working to solve the major challenges Japan faces. Consul-General Kato discusses these challenges and outlines Japan’s path for-ward to prosperity.

Aki Kawamura’s talk will center on Kankuro Kudos, a popular screenwriter, dramatist, director and actor in Japan. His latest film, King of Apology, recently premiered in New York City.

Kawamura researches contemporary American literature and culture in the context of postmodern and ethnic studies, especially 9/11 novels like works by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Safran Foer, and politics of hip hop culture. He has been recently interested in Japanese artists influenced by American culture, and would like to introduce them to American society as a Japanese researcher specializing in American studies.



A reception will follow the talk.



Sponsored by the American Studies Program 

Title:  On a thermodynamically consisted Stefan problem with variable surface energy

Abstract:  Given a filtration of a simplicial complex we can construct a series of invariants called the persistent homology groups of the filtration. In this talk we will give a basic introduction to the theory of persistence and explain how these ideas can be used in data analysis.

"New Lines"

Abstract: In the twenty years that have passed since the fabled Friday Harbor meetings of November 1993, where GIS practitioners and critical human geographers agreed to a cease-fire, the GIS & Society agenda has been reflected upon, pushed forward, and diffracted in few (but intellectually significant) arenas. Critical, participatory, public participation, and feminist GIS have given way more recently to qualitative GIS, GIS and non-representational theory, and the spatial digital humanities. Traveling at the margins of these efforts has been a kind of social history of mapping and GIS. And while GIScience has been conversant and compatible with many of these permutations in the GIS & Society agenda, a social history of mapping and GIS (as signaled most directly by John Pickles in 2004) has perhaps the least potential for tinkering with GIScience practice (see recent conversation between Agnieszka Leszczynski and Jeremy Crampton in 2009). Perhaps this disconnect is growing, as can be witnessed in the feverish emergence of a ‘big data’ analytics/representation perspective within the contemporary GISciences (alongside the growth of funding paths around cyberinfrastructure). What then is the relevance and role of a social history of GIS for GIScience practice? In this presentation, I sketch and reflect upon a diversity of efforts that address this question.

Register at: http://craftwriting.as.uky.edu

This one day event will bring to UK brewers and professional writers from the craft beer industry. Craft beer, the annual production of under six million barrels of beer by small breweries, is one of the fastest growing areas of the food industry. According to the Brewers Association, craft beer provides over 108,000 jobs and its retail dollar value in 2012 was estimated at $10.2 billion. In the last twenty years, over 2,000 new breweries have come online, commanding almost 6% of the overall American beer market. These breweries have, in turn, helped revitalize city neighborhoods, generated new jobs in related industries, and played a key role in expanding digital and social media usage.

This event will showcase the professional writing – in print and digital media – that is dominant in the craft beer industry. Writing has played a major role in promoting the business of craft beer. Craft Writing will serve as an event that draws interdisciplinary attention to the ways industry utilizes writing – in various digital forms – to promote, inform, highlight, argue, market, brand, and foster relationships between products, consumers, and other relevant parties.

Featured Speakers:

Stan Hieronymus, author of For The Love of Hops, Brewing with Wheat, and Brew Like a Monk. Blogger at Appellation Beer and For the Love of Hops.

Julie Johnson, Co-owner of All About Beer, former Editor of All Bout Beer. Currently Technical and Contributing Editor.

Teri Fahrendorf, 25-year beer industry veteran, founder of the Pink Boots Society, author of beer related articles, 19 years brewmaster at Steelhead Brewing, Triple Rock Brewing and Golden Gate Brewing, and blogging gypsy “Road Brewer,”

Roger Baylor, owner of New Albanian Brewing, author of The Potable Curmudgeon.

Jeremy Cowan, owner of Shmaltz Brewing, author of Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah.

Mitch Steele, Brewmaster at Stone Brewing, author of IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes, and the Evolution of India Pale Ale.

Keynote speaker

Garrett Oliver, Editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, author of The Brewmaster’s Table, regular contributor to All About Beer. Brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery

Title:  Universal wave patterns

Abstract:  A feature of solutions of a (generally nonlinear) field

theory can be called "universal" if it is independent of side conditions like initial data. I will explain this phenomenon in some detail and then illustrate it in the context of the sine-Gordon equation, a fundamental relativistic nonlinear wave equation. In particular I will describe some recent results (joint work with R. Buckingham) concerning a universal wave pattern that appears for all initial data that crosses the separatrix in the phase portrait of the simple pendulum.  The pattern is fantastically complex and beautiful to look at but not hard to describe in terms of elementary solutions of the sine-Gordon equation and the collection of rational solutions of the famous inhomogeneous Painlev\'e-II equation.